Self-Translation and the Translator’s (In)visibility in Nabokov’s Pnin (1957)

Nabokovian scholarship has consistently emphasised the plurilingual aspects in Nabokov’s oeuvre. His American novels frequently include numerous sentences in Russian and French, which are often translated or discussed from a metalinguistic angle by the author. A remarkable example in this regard is the autobiography Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited (1966), which conjures up various places where Nabokov spent different periods of his life, along with the languages overlapping in his European memoirs. Considering that the coexistence of foreign terms and expressions is common in Nabokov’s works, this article aims to analyse the linguistic architecture and aspects of self-translation in one of his American novels, Pnin. While this study dwells on the numerous grammatical and phonetic inaccuracies that feature in the protagonist’s dialogues, it also means to investigate the issue pertaining to the translator’s (in)visibility in the text. The analysis will be carried out in light of Venuti’s (2018) theories, which foreground the crucial yet often overlooked role of the translator, particularly in contexts where translation is domesticated. By quoting various examples of self-translated expressions from the novel, as well as grammatical and phonetic mistakes, the article traces the linguistic borders in the story, shedding light on the work of the translator, whose presence becomes discernible through the foreignizing effect generated by the numerous non-English words, mistakes and inaccuracies. The work thus engages with the issue of Nabokov’s (in)visibility in the story, since the translator’s presence is not always detectable as the storyline progresses. The alternation of domestication and foreignization, linguistic adaptation and estrangement, is infused with the writer’s investigation into his linguistic past which, in Cronin’s (2013, 19) words, sheds light on the “historical sense” of the languages employed. The exploration of Nabokov’s linguistic past, expressed through numerous foreignisms, paves the way for an analysis of the writer’s double, thereby providing a more nuanced illustration of Nabokov’s linguistic transition.